Would Obama Be President If He Made These Five Campaign Promises?

Calling a politician dishonest is like calling a burglar dishonest. The difference is that burglars take less of your money, don’t get invited on the Sunday morning shows, and are more dangerous — unless you happen to be a woman near a male member of the Kennedy family.

Even amongst politicians, Barack Obama is such a liar that he makes Bill Clinton look like honest Abe Lincoln by comparison. During the campaign, Barack Obama promised everything to everybody and when people inquired too closely, his supporters screamed that you had to be a racist for doubting him.

Well now, Barack Obama is President of the United States and he can no longer hide behind “hope” and “change” while he votes “present” on the tough issues. Now, people can actually judge Barack Obama based on what he’s doing instead of just projecting their hopes and dreams on a man with no record of leadership and a gift for soaring oratory.

Quite frankly, 2008 was a dream scenario for Barack. The sitting Republican President had a 25% approval rating, the GOP ran an old, uninspiring candidate who was disliked by much of the base, and there was a botched response to a last minute financial crisis that slammed the door shut on the GOP’s last hopes of winning.

Still, with all those advantages, could Barack Obama have become President had he told the American people what he actually intended to do in his first year as President instead of essentially saying, “Imagine what you want a politician to be. Ok, got it? Great, that’s what I’m going to do!”

Would Obama have been elected if he had told Americans the truth?

1) My fellow Americans, I pledge to push an unpopular health care plan that will lead to higher premiums, higher taxes, huge cuts to Medicare, exploding deficits, rationing, taxpayer-funded abortions, a single payer system and poor medical care! Of course, Barack Obama did talk about wanting to reform the health care system as a candidate, but the talk was long on the uninsured riding on the backs of unicorns to get free service from legions of faery doctors and was short on the truth of what the plan would actually look like. Obama also never told Americans that he would try to do the plan without Republican help, slam it through before the August break without even giving anyone time to read it, and would purposefully ignore the American people’s strong and oft expressed objections to his idea.

2) Under my administration, we’ll send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York to be tried for reasons no one seems to be able to explain. Back in 2006 Barack Obama said a “military tribunal was a perfectly fine way of handling such dangerous individuals as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”

Why has he changed his mind? Who knows? There has been no coherent explanation given. Maybe Obama made it based on how shiny his teleprompter happened to be that day.

It’s hard to figure out what the advantages would be of the trial. Is there a chance KSM could get off on a technicality? Sure. Is there a risk KSM could use the trial as a platform to launch a propaganda campaign? Yes. Does it increase the chances of a terrorist attack on New York? It does. Are we risking having sensitive intelligence information and interrogation methods get out? We are. There’s not even a propaganda value to the trial since Obama has assured everyone, before the trial starts, that KSM is going to be convicted and given the death penalty. Thanks for doing something that dumb in the first place, Obama, and then following up by making it look to the world like a Stalinesque show trial. It’s things like this that show Barack Obama is actually every bit as dumb as they falsely accused Dan Quayle of being.

3) If you make me the next President of the United States, I will completely abandon bipartisanship and run the most partisan administration in American history! I make no bones about the fact that I’m no big fan of bipartisanship. However, Barack Obama made it one of the central themes of his campaign.

How does that square with passing a stimulus bill that will cost over a trillion dollars with no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate? How about being willing to pass a takeover of 1/6 of our nation’s economy with what may be no Republican votes by the time it’s all said and done? How about not meeting with GOP Leaders on health care since April?

How about this quote? Does it sound like something a person who’s willing to work with the other side would say?

“But, I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

If you’re liberal you might like Barack Obama’s high-handed arrogance and his hamfisted partisanship, while conservatives probably don’t like it one bit. But what everyone should be able to agree on is that it doesn’t remotely resemble his campaign promises of “unity” and “bipartisanship.”

4) Under my administration, taxpayers will throw away tens of billions of dollars to prop up General Motors and Chrysler in order to give payback to the unions that help get me elected. Even Mr. Bipartisan, John McCain, admits that what was done with GM and Chrysler was a politically motivated disaster:

It is all about the unions. The unions don’t want to have their very generous contracts renegotiated so we will put $80 billion into both General Motors and Chrysler, and if anybody believes that Chrysler is going to survive, I’d like to meet them.

Will we ever get out of those companies? Will we ever get our money back? Are we better off now than if we’d simply allowed both companies to go to bankruptcy court without Congress interfering in the process? The answer to all those questions seems likely to be “no.”

5) If you elect me as President, I will put this nation over a trillion dollars in debt for a stimulus bill that will be doomed to failure before it’s even passed! There’s so little evidence that the stimulus bill has helped the economy that even Saturday Night Live has started making fun of the idea in skits. Of course, the whole idea never made any sense in the first place, since it was enacted in the first half of 2009 despite the fact that the “Congressional Budget Office estimated that the recession would end in the ‘second half of 2009″‘ even if Obama did nothing.“ So, even if the recession is over, as many economists are speculating — it means nothing because it would have happened anyway. It’s like we spent a trillion dollars to guarantee that it would get cold during the winter.

Could Barack Obama have told the American people the truth and got elected, even under the most favorable circumstances to liberals since Richard Nixon was impeached? There’s about as much chance of that as there is that Al Gore will give up living in a big mansion and move to a Unabomber style shack in order to “save the earth.”